Tuesday Telescope: After spacewalking, an astronaut strikes lightning
Most astronauts these days are fairly anonymous, and chances are you have never heard of Nichole Ayers. And that’s OK.
But sometimes it’s worth pausing for a moment to reflect on just how accomplished these people are. Ayers, 36, flew the supersonic F-22 stealth aircraft in the international war against the Islamic State and rose to become a major in the US Air Force before being selected as a NASA astronaut in 2021. Oh, yeah, she also completed a master’s degree in computational and applied mathematics at Rice University.
For her first spaceflight, Ayers launched on the Crew-10 mission to the International Space Station in March. This flight got a fair amount of media attention, but that was largely because the arrival of Crew-10 allowed the Crew Dragon spacecraft to which Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were assigned to return home. Since then, Ayers has spent 50 days in space, astronauting. This included a spacewalk last week, her first, alongside veteran astronaut Anne McClain.
